Getting Started with Shield

This getting started guide walks you through installing Shield, setting up basic authentication, and getting started with role-based access control. You can install Shield on nodes running Elasticsearch 2.1.2.

The Shield plugin must be installed on every node in the cluster. If you are installing to a live cluster, you must stop all of the nodes, install Shield, and restart the nodes. You cannot perform a rolling restart to install Shield.

To install and run Shield:

Run bin/plugin install from ES_HOME to install the license plugin.
```
bin/plugin install license
```
Run bin/plugin install to install the Shield plugin.
```
bin/plugin install shield
```
If you are using a DEB/RPM distribution of Elasticsearch, you need to run the installation with superuser permissions. To perform an offline installation, download the Shield binaries.
Start Elasticsearch.
```
bin/elasticsearch
```

To verify that Shield is up and running, use the _shield API to get the Shield version:

curl -u es_admin -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_shield'

You can also check the startup log entries. When Shield is operating normally, the log indicates that the network transports are using Shield:

[2014-10-09 13:47:38,841][INFO ][transport ] [Ezekiel Stane] Using [org.elasticsearch.shield.transport.ShieldServerTransportService] as transport service, overridden by [shield]
[2014-10-09 13:47:38,841][INFO ][transport ] [Ezekiel Stane] Using [org.elasticsearch.shield.transport.netty.ShieldNettyTransport] as transport, overridden by [shield]
[2014-10-09 13:47:38,842][INFO ][http      ] [Ezekiel Stane] Using [org.elasticsearch.shield.transport.netty.ShieldNettyHttpServerTransport] as http transport, overridden by [shield]

Now you’re ready to secure your cluster! Here are a few things you might want to do to start with:

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